About Bika LIMS

bika (bi:ka Zulu) report, from clan to clan, bring news of weddings, births, festivals and funerals. tell it as it is

Roots

The Bika Open Source LIMS project started out as prototype, Bach, piloted in the Western Cape wine industry in 2002. Given the cost of unwieldy pre-Internet proprietary systems, there was a clear need for affordable, easy-to-use LIMS and instrument integration.

Web clients were becoming popular but few LIMS were web based, often merely web enabled legacy systems. And none were doing Open Source wet chemistry.

Bika 1, built form the ground up in modern web application server and CMS framework Zope and Plone, went into production in 2004 with first public release in 2005.

The system has since seen incremental growth through major releases Inkosi 'Chief' LIMS 2 and Gaob 'King' LIMS 3, including micro-biology and branches for health care, water quality management and inter-laboratory proficiency testing. Bika LIMS 4 code evolved into Senaite LIMS 1, with big refactoring and performance enhancements.

The software's future is ensured with effective organisational structure and many global developers, in high demand, currently expanding the system with the support of sponsoring clients, peer review by co-developers, and testing by fast expanding user base.

Bika Health Foundation

To ensure it remains available Free and Open Source, the program code and intellectual property for Bika Health, Bika's health care LIMS, belong to the non-profit Bika Health Foundation, # 2008/008390/08, registered 31 March 2008 at the South African Companies and Intellectual Property Office as:

The Foundation invites academics, open source development communities, philanthropists and institutional role players to participate and sponsor development and distribution of public health laboratory systems.

Bika Lab Systems

Holistic FOSS. Ethos

Bika aims to fulfil laboratoryrequirements holistically, with full system ownership, including the program code, by the laband complete knowledge transfer to staff. This propagates the system to everybody's benefit without any barriers.

Bika offersfree upgrade paths, no license fees and no vendor lock-in. Systems remain customisable and continue to inherit further enhancements from other contributions free of charge.

Open Source contributes to local economies, directly through savings in license fees, and indirectly through the benefit of skills development, doing away with the black boxes of conventional proprietary, closed-source information technology.